1837: From poetry to eagle sightings, it was all news

The early issues of The Quincy Patriot offered generous amounts of fiction, poetry, home and farm hints and foreign correspondence. As was the custom, much of the news was exchanged with other papers.

By Richard W. Carlisle

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By Richard W. Carlisle

Posted Jan. 6, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jan 6, 2012 at 6:21 AM

By Richard W. Carlisle

Posted Jan. 6, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jan 6, 2012 at 6:21 AM

» Social News

The early issues of The Quincy Patriot offered generous amounts of fiction, poetry, home and farm hints and foreign correspondence. As was the custom, much of the news was exchanged with other papers.

In the first issue it was news that a “female anti-slavery society” had been formed in Dorchester, and that the Hingham and Quincy Bridge and Turnpike Co. had declared a $10 dividend. Later the paper would report that a town pump had been installed at Hancock and Granite streets, and that eagles had been sighted in nearby woods.

Osborne left the enterprise after three months to found the Danbury, Conn., News, and later to publish newspapers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The 22-year-old Green, who had been a printer’s apprentice in Hingham and an editor in New York before coming to Quincy, continued as The Patriot’s editor and publisher until his death, except for a three-year interval.

That first year was good for news. One event reported on the pages of The Patriot would be unbelievable today: The United States government not only found that it had a surplus of funds but also decided to distribute the excess to the nation’s towns and cities.

Quincy received $5,148.36 which it prudently applied to its debt. Because of the money panic, Congress later voted to rescind its largesse, but Quincy apparently got its share before the vote.

The nation’s population had reached 15.8 million in 1837, and Michigan became the 26th state. In England, Victoria ascended the throne, giving her name to an age that would continue until the end of the century.

Other events in 1837, like the feared Texan statehood, would have an effect upon the underlying national issue of the next three decades: slavery.

In Illinois, a young state legislator named Abraham Lincoln (descendant of the Hingham Lincolns) was admitted to the bar. In the same state, a newspaper editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was slain for his anti-slavery views.

In Quincy and the neighboring towns of Weymouth and Braintree, petitions against slavery were gathered and given to John Quincy Adams who had been elected congressman from the area after serving as the nation’s sixth president. Adams wrote many letters to Green. One dealt with the difficulty in getting such petitions admitted in Congress. Printed in The Patriot, as were the other letters, it addressed the “right to petition” rather than the slavery issue:

“My respect and reverence for the right to petition has been bred in the bone by the law of nature preceding all formations of constitutional government, preceding even the institution of civil government.”

Adams’ stand on the right to petition, slavery and civil rights in general, received unequivocal support from The Quincy Patriot which editorialized: “he has boldly stood forth as the advocate of doctrines the correctness of which, in this age and especially in this land, should be unquestioned. If the present does not award him justice, the future most assuredly will.”

Page 2 of 2 - In an early issue The Patriot called attention to another rights problem, one still unsettled: “It is too true, that almost the entire history of the conduct of our own Anglo-Saxon race to the North American Indians is one of fraud, opposition and cruelty. While we offer shelter for the persecuted and outcast of other lands, does the same pity and sympathy spring up in our breast when we think of the downtrodden and oppressed within our own border?”